Commissioner’s Notes

Another week down, and a close one again. We’re getting into the real meat of the season and finally getting a better selection of good games.

Choke Job of the Week

We have a strong contender for Choke Job of the year. I am shocked to see somebody trying to wrest the crown from Michigan vs WMU so quickly, but here we are. If you haven’t seen the ending of NC State at Vandy, stop what you’re doing and go watch it now. Absolute disasterclass of football from decision making to coaching to execution. Between Cristobal’s failure to kneel the ball in 2023 vs Georgia Tech and this, it’s kind of remarkable how a conference with some of the best universities in the entire world can be so incredibly stupid at the ends of games. And not just the end of the game – NC State had 1st & 10 with 1:33 to go in the second quarter and managed to give the ball back to Vanderbilt and give up a touchdown (with the help of a bogus DPI on a pass that nearly hit the cross-bar of the field goal, but should never have come to that). If there’s been a worse 4 minutes of football than NC State at the end of both halves, I don’t want to see it.

In Our Game

In our game we had a lot of shakeups in the middle of day, but it was a fairly strong win with Dylan leading or just off the lead from wire to wire. We’re converging as the randomness of who has cupcake games and when evens out, at least with respect to cumulative points. We’re getting a lot of close finishes and garbage-time decisions are having substantial impacts on things. The average score gap between spots (i.e. between 1st and 2nd, between 2nd and 3rd, etc) for each week is currently at 43.5, basically a field goal per lineup spot.

I’ll do a bigger overview of this closer to mid-season when we have more data points to say something interesting, but I will mention that this week was notable for a single-touchdown (plus 2PC) difference between first and second, which is a 2-point swing in the match play standings (moving up 1 spot + taking the overall leader). That’s really unfortunate luck for Bob that none of his teams could steal an extra touchdown, and especially unfortunate that he’s got the top 4 “redundant” teams this week, including 2 that were better than +8. He had the points, just didn’t have anywhere to put them. Sad. But speaking of luck…

Let’s Talk About Luck

We’re only 3 weeks into the season so everything is going to be a bit noisy, but it’s been immediately apparent that luck wasn’t in Jacob’s favor after playing the white pod winner in both of the first two weeks, and then again having a good week but losing his PVP matchup. Bob via text message seemed to not have much sympathy for him because he’s supposedly just as unlucky…and it turns out they’re both right. With only 6 players it’s pretty easy to add up every possible PVP permutation and evaluate luck from a perspective of “Out of all the possible combinations of PVP matchups that are possible, in what percentage of them would a player have this record or better?” And at least through the small sample size of 3 weeks, Jacob and Bob literally have all the bad luck. Jacob and Bob, based on everyone’s weekly scores, should have an expected win total of 1.4 and 2.2, and yet currently sit at 0 and 1 wins respectively. As it stands now, their 1 combined win out of an expected 3.6 means that the other 4 of us all have positive luck. Thanks guys!

Changes This Week

This carries two sets of changes because I didn’t do an update last week. For the website and picks, I’ve made a couple small quality of life changes and bug fixes. In the weekly picks form, there was a bug that would have prevented you from selecting your week 0 games if you dropped the team. I don’t think this applied to anyone except me so far, but it’s preemptively fixed for anyone who would have needed it.

In the weekly status pages, I’ve updated a little bit to add a couple new features. I’ve added a new rudimentary projection for players’ points. It is based on the spreads, so before the start of games it will be the sum of all your teams’ spreads. As the games progress, it “prorates” the spread and assumes your team will continue at the rate the spreads suggest for the rest of the game. As a demonstration example, if you have a 30 point favorite, it will project +30. At halftime, it expects them to go +15 for the rest of the game, so if your team is tied it will project 0+15=15, and if they’re up 40 it will project 40+15=55. This is the “week proj” value in the scorecards, and the “week” value is your actual, real points.

I’ve placed the scoring guide with PVP matchups on a page accessible from the homepage, since it was contained as a post and was getting buried in the feed of newer posts. You can find that in “Scoring Guide and Records” here: https://zachcrockett.com/standings-rosters-and-records/.

I am aware of issues getting the page to load new data. I’m having trouble fixing this because I’m not able to reproduce it. The solution that has seemed to work is to go directly to the post itself, rather than the homepage. From the zachcrockett.com home page, click on the title of the weekly status page to see it as a standalone page instead of in the feed. You can also find links to all weeks’ status and recap posts through https://zachcrockett.com/weekly-status/.

Drop/Adds

Week 2

• Dylan: California → Tulsa
• Dylan: Clemson → Florida International
• Jacob: Nevada → Wyoming
• Zach: Florida Atlantic → Colorado State
• Zach: Eastern Michigan → Cincinnati
• Bruce: South Alabama → Arkansas State
• Dan: UTEP → Auburn
• Dan: Florida State → Wake Forest

Week 3

• Dan: Army → Oklahoma State
• Dan: Navy → Nebraska
• Dan: Air Force → UCF
• Dylan: Florida International → UL Monroe
• Dylan: San Diego State → Missouri
• Dylan: Kansas → Oklahoma State
• Dylan: NC State → Boston College
• Zach: Buffalo → Florida Atlantic
• Zach: Arizona State → Massachusetts
• Zach: UTSA → California
• Jacob: Vanderbilt → App State

Next Week Preview

Next week the PVP matchups are:

• Bob (1-2) vs Dan (1-2)
• Dylan (2-1) vs Bruce (2-1)
• Jacob (0-3) vs Zach (3-0)

Don’t forget about Week 0 selections. These are the remaining games yet to be played:

• Bruce: USC (+16)
• Dan: Florida State (+17)
• Dylan: USC (+16)
• Jacob: TCU (-5)
• Jacob: Virginia (+26)

Games of the week:

• Thursday: only one game, but a pretty intriguing matchup of Jamey Chadwell and Liberty vs his old school Coastal Carolina which hasn’t been the same since. Coastal has been inconsistent so far, playing West Virginia slightly close than they played Delaware.
• Saturday noon: Texas @ UT is the big one, by a large margin. It will be the first real test for Faizon Brandon and a potential for the biggest win in Neyland in a couple years.
  • The sicko game of the week is also going on at the same time. Ball State (#134 FPI/#131 SP+) at Kent State (#137/#133). Will be a strong contender for worst combined game of the year. According to Sagarin (the most prominent pollster I could find with combined FBS/FCS rankings), this is a worse pairing of teams than FCS Montana vs UC Davis.
• Saturday afternoon: by the rankings, this should be #18 Iowa @ #19 Michigan. But I do not recognize the legitimacy of michigan so I’ll select Oklahoma at Georgia. Oklahoma looks very shaky after an 8 point win vs New Mexico and a loss to Michigan. They’ve scored 31 points since Labor Day and they’ve got 4 games including this one that look like near-guaranteed losses. It’s not outside the realm of possibility they could end up on the bubble of bowl eligibility if they don’t improve on the last two weeks.
• Saturday evening: for watching, probably Texas A&M at LSU. Both teams attempting to bounce back, both teams the epitome of not doing things The Right Way^TM, between A&M throwing bags of cash at the problem and Lane and LSU…being Lane and LSU. Backup intriguing game is Oregon at USC. USC struggled at Rutgers unlike powerhouse UMass and comparable to another powerhouse BC, so how good are they? Same question goes for Oregon. Cool, good job running up the score in a game that would have been better to replace with a real game and just give away money to Portland State, but what will you look like in your first real game after losing to terrible OK State?
• Saturday late night: not a big game, but a good chance to watch the Misnomer Bowl: a conference game in the Mid-American Conference between UMass (126 mile drive from stadium to Plymouth Rock) and Sacramento State (107 miles from stadium to Stinson beach).

Commissioner’s Notes